Death and the Orange

Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett

George P. Landow created this formatted version of The Book of Wonder, which was first oublished in 1915, using the Project Gutenberg text produced by Anne Reshnyk, Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Two dark young men in a foreign southern land sat at a restaurant
table with one woman.

And on the woman's plate was a small orange which had an evil
laughter in its heart.

And both of the men would be looking at the woman all the time, and
they ate little and they drank much.

And the woman was smiling equally at each.

Then the small orange that had the laughter in its heart rolled
slowly off the plate on to the floor. And the dark young men both
sought for it at once, and they met suddenly beneath the table, and
soon they were speaking swift words to one another, and a horror
and an impotence came over the Reason of each as she sat helpless
at the back of the mind, and the heart of the orange laughed and the
woman went on smiling; and Death, who was sitting at another table,
tete-a-tete with an old man, rose and came over to listen to the quarrel.